Public sympathy for teachers is not a licence to strike for an unsustainable pay claim.

Today's strike by teachers in the state and Catholic systems is hugely disruptive, and not only for their schools. Parents have had to make other arrangements for their children or, at worst, take the day off work.

Many parents oppose the strike but sympathise with teachers, as Parents Victoria president Gail McHardy has observed: "No one denies the fact that teaching is really demanding and that teachers are not paid appropriately."

The Age, too, has sympathy for teachers, but rather less sympathy for their second strike in six months.

The claim for a 30 per cent pay increase over three years is simply unsustainable at this stage of the economic cycle.

The timing is bad, too, for those teachers who are likely to benefit from this week's federal announcement of an extra $3.6 billion over four years for Victorian Catholic schools.

The State Government, for its part, has stuck rigidly to its offer of a 9 per cent pay rise over three years, of which 2.25 per cent is tied to productivity.

It has provocatively suggested cutting a week from teachers' 12 weeks of "holidays", in what appears to be a ploy to paint teachers in a bad light - the move would increase costs despite the Government's case resting on its lack of capacity to pay more.

The Auditor-General has warned of the risks of high wage growth as a slowing economy cuts deep into the state's biggest revenue streams. The Treasury forecast of average annual increases of 3.4 per cent in budget expenses to 2006-07 exceeds total operating revenue increases of 3.2 per cent.

Elsewhere, though, the 3 per cent cap on annual pay rises that state governments agreed to last year has already been breached.

West Australian teachers have won increases of 9 to 14.5 per cent over two-and-a-half years; Queensland teachers got 10.8 per cent over three years; the NSW Industrial Relations Commission has granted teachers an interim six-month increase of 5.5 per cent.

In seeking to reconcile fairness with affordability, the Bracks Government may have to improve its offer, albeit modestly, but we would urge all sides to take a more creative, less pay-centred approach.

Cannot the working lives of teachers, burdened with so many duties, be made better in non-monetary ways? Such a solution depends on a shared, intimate understanding of how schools and budgets operate, but surely Labor is supposed to bring to government an ability to work with, rather than against, unions.

Instead, the Government and teacher unions have treated each other shabbily - for instance, an AEU "fact sheet" even suggested that members were getting a poorer deal than under the Kennett government.

It is true that voters expect certain things of Labor, which includes investing as much as it can in public education, and this dispute presents a test of its ability to govern as a Labor government.

But it also represents a test of education unions, whose members, for all their anger and frustration, should have a strong interest in avoiding a repeat of the excesses that politically set the scene for the drastic cutbacks of the Kennett era.

The Government and unions have locked themselves into a dispute that both may come to regret.